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Piggybacking off of my last comment, are there others who feel that modern games seem not to be as fun as games from late 90s to late 2000s? This may be nostalgia talking, but people around me game less than they did, and most games they play are MMO ones, as opposed to campaign-focused ones like Half-Life.
I have not played a whole lot of modern games, but their gameplay does not seem to be that big of an improvement over things I have seen before. In many cases, modern shooters feel quite slow compared to arena shooters like unreal tournament or Quake. I was looking at games to play and very caught my eye beyond the new doom games.
"Fun" is a really tough metric to measure, but I think there's probably something to the theory that microtransactions and live service being such big moneymakers for the industry has pushed high budget developers towards optimizing for keeping players addicted rather than keeping them entertained. There's also the fact that the gaming industry was much smaller and low status in the 90s and 00s compared to now, and so devs tended to be nerds who wanted to make games they wanted to play, rather than people who wanted to make money and/or spread a message.
However, it's not as if such devs have disappeared; if you're comparing like for like, there are more games being released these days of the same technological quality as a Quake from 1996 or even a Half Life 2 from 2004 than were released in those years, made by small unknown teams. But there are so many of them, and the vast majority of them suck, so it's hard to find good ones. AAA games get all the attention for obvious reasons, and those are the ones that often are optimized around things other than just convincing you to pay a one-time fee based on how fun the experience is. Even then, when I think about AAA games I've played recently, like Elden Ring or Final Fantasy 16, they compare pretty favorably in terms of "fun" to equivalent-ish AAA games I played 20+ years ago, like Devil May Cry 3 or Final Fantasy 10/10-2/13.
I've heard that recently there was a revival in the FPS genre of "Boomer Shooters," which are fast-paced shooters inspired by those old games like Doom and Quake whose controls and speed were based around video game logic more than around realism. As a fan of those old games back in the day, I've been meaning to check out some of them, such as Dusk.
You can keep players hooked, not addicted and entertained. And paying. War Thunder knows how to do that.
Also: Doom (2016) is pretty much an almost perfect single-player version of the 'boomer shooter'. I liked it very much, in terms of combat it favorably compares to Unreal Tournament ('99, 2003 and 2004, all of which I completed several times).
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